Posts by Emma Hart

When we went to Midnight Movies at the Westend in the early 90s, they would play God Save the Queen before The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or A Clockwork Orange or whatever we'd gone to see. And we would fucking stand.

So I read the original story, because pretty much my wheelhouse, and thought, I bet there’s more to this. Then the gaynz story turned up – far from the first time their reporting on something like this has outdone mainstream media, I assume they’re less concerned with pageviews. I tweeted it, posted it on Facebook, and then decided that no, I wouldn’t spend the entire rest of the day correcting other people’s outraged Facebook posts. I also got this reply on Twitter:

this is my sister. She has been harassed by that journo for the last week. Absolutely no respect.

There is a follow-up on Stuff this morning, and the whole thing appears to still be spiralling down.

Flag waving didn’t figure, you didn’t start the day at primary school with a pledge to anything or anyone

I have a very vague memory of a proposal when I was at intermediate - so, 83, 84 - for schools to start the day by ceremonially raising the flag. I was Really Mad about it: what a crushing, senseless waste of time. I guess they were worried about our lack of patriotism.

I think that’s probably (a) an accurate description of the quality, and (b) not something I can really be bothered with.

I think it's a good description of that kind of jingoistic patriotism we associate with America, "We're number one!" I think ours is more like, "I think my country's done some good shit." I would in fact argue that the most patriotic thing you can believe is that your country is capable of being better.

3) NZer’s tend to cringe at campaigns of any sort rather than joining in.

I do wonder if, were the general thrust of the campaign was in favour of retaining the flag, quite the reverse would have happened with submissions.

So I'm seeing, on Twitter, a whole bunch of English people who live in safe Tory seats saying they'll be voting Labour, and it's worth doing, because of the idea that the party that gets the highest % of the vote has the moral authority to form the government. Which is good, but it's also weird.

They’ve omitted to mention the potentially preclusive step between ‘fill it in’ and ‘upload it’, namely getting the document witnessed.

They really did. Mark, I've been told the Justice and Electoral Select Committee is still taking submissions on the election process, even though their deadline has officially passed. I'm sure the experience of overseas voters is something they should be hearing.

To now hugely tangent, I have a suspicion I can't really back up that maybe the Easy Vote card is contributing to a drop in turnout, because people think they need it to vote, and if they never received it or they lost it, they can't vote. People are perceiving it as voter ID. We had people come in without it on the off-chance that they could vote if they produced a driver's licence or similar ID. It's like we're confusing people by making the process too simple.

The regrettable part is that this solution would perpetuate the current double standard where it is OK to run a civic participation campaign using roll information if out are also standing in the election, but not if you are a non-partisan, pro-turnout group.